Dispatches from the Bolivarian Revolution

April 2008 Archives

April 1, 2008

Santiago, Chile

Hey check it out one of our readers traveled to Santiago de Chile and spray painted this catchy slogan all over a dark, blurry picture of Pinochet’s torture house so that BoRev readers would remember what actual Latin American autocracies look like. Here at Londres 38, thousands of Chilean leftists and their families were tormented daily with electricity, dog attacks and waterboarding, not to mention the "routine use of two-tier beds, where wives, mothers and grandfathers were tortured within inches of their husbands, sons and grandchildren.”

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April 3, 2008

Watch Your Back, Hopey!

You may have heard, but supporters of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe have been on some sort of deranged killing spree of trade unionists over the past forever. And presidential hopeful Barack Obama is cynically using this technicality as an excuse to oppose a trade deal with the country even though they are our best ally. Can you believe politicians? Well Alvaro Uribe sure can’t. He’s pissed. And Obama is dead meat.

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Everything I Needed to Know About the Future I Learned from the Year 2027 Edition of Risk

In case you were wondering, global warming will devastate coastal regions, causing Lake Maracaibo to explode and prompting militant bands of landless eco-warriors to take up arms. Cheez Doodles remain popular, we get to teleport, and the upper part of South America is renamed Tierra del Chavez THE END.

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Ornery Old Coot Knows How This World Works So Back The F*** Off

You know who’s not concerned about all those dead trade unionists in Colombia? Bob fucking Novak that’s who. Fact is the old douchenozzle wouldn’t shed a single goddamn tear if all the fat Warshington labor bosses turned up with their own stinking throats slit, know what I mean? Would show Americans who’s really running this goddamn world goddammit.

Every time Novak commits his “thoughts” to paper it’s a treat. Even more so when he starts connecting the dots! Join us down the rabbit hole, after the jump.

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April 4, 2008

No New FARC Developments!

So this French plane has been on the tarmac of Bogota’s Catam military base for two days now, waiting to bring famous hostage Ingrid Betancourt back to the warm bosom of her homeland, only technically the FARC aren’t going to let her go. It’s all very weird and there’s nothing new to report, yet there are zillions of reporters around so we get reactions from:

The Church. Cardinal Dario Castrillon says the FARC should release Betancourt to honor the anniversary of the death of Pope John Paul II. Ha ha like they give a fuck.

Nicolas Sarkozy. The French President promised to house any guerrilla rebels freed in a hostage exchange “in its Caribbean territories,” but not, like say, in “France.”
Hugo Chavez. The Ven Prez says he “won’t rest” until she’s free. Only he’s not invited.

The Family. Sister Astrid says the Colombian government is exploiting her sister’s health problems for political purposes, and that the whole French plan was a dumb idea, “If this is a success in any way, it will be a miracle as there was no prior agreement."

The French. They think Sarkozy has a hero complex and bitch that poor French citizens would never get this kind of attention.
The FARC. “The rebel group has insisted that as part of any prisoner exchange, two FARC leaders imprisoned in the United States must also be let go.”
From a U.S. prison. Sorry, folks. Sigh.

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April 6, 2008

Mark Penn is Overweight, Unemployed

Say is that a fat, melty, effete walrus there in the picture? Haha no it’s just a sad, sweaty, effete Mark Penn. This is the “pollster” who bucked polling conventions (and the law) back in 2004 by releasing exit polls showing Chavez losing the Venezuelan recall referendum that every other pollster said he won. Also he is the husky gentleman behind all the fake exit polling during all of those global “color revolutions” where "anti-American" presidents mysteriously lost on election day, prompting widespread riots, resignations, and assorted bloodshed.

Anyway earlier this week we find that he has also been on the payroll of the Colombian government, even while serving as the top adviser for some Hillary person who is running for president of the United States. And when all that came out he was fired from Colombia’s employ, and just now he “resigned” from the Clinton campaign. And now Hillary won’t be able to fake her exit polls and John McCain will win after Obama is assassinated by the Colombians and Mark Penn will rule us all forever, somehow, in some fat, pasty, evil way.

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April 7, 2008

British Media Shocker! Rory Carroll "Doesn't Regard Himself as a 'Champion of Impartiality'"

The Guardian has what they call a “readers’ editor” who goes through the newspaper’s inbox and replies publicly to the crap that the cranks write in. Fun job! Anyway today they take on the burning question of whether “the Guardian's coverage of Venezuela is overly critical of the government and the president, Hugo Chávez.” Instead of the obvious quickie response (“duh”) Siobhain Butterworth decided to get to the bottom of it all by talking to the paper’s Latin America correspondent. [Oddly, Butterworth refuses to name the correspondent and just refers to him throughout the piece as “the correspondent,” which is dumb and annoying, because everybody knows his name is Rory Carroll and so we’ve included a photo of both correspondent and editor above]

Remarkably, Rory opens his heart and explains his daily struggle against the bourgeois notions of “impartiality” and “journalism," you see...

>>> “The correspondent doesn't regard himself as a ‘champion of impartiality.”

>>> “The correspondent's stories sometimes include his own point of view: ‘Some of the writing is observational,’ he told me.”

>>> “He agrees it can be difficult to separate fact and comment in this style of reporting.”

Wow that last one is a relief because I just thought I was crazy. Butterworth cautions us not to get all worked up about Rory’s relationship with objectivity though, because basically there’s no law against it. You see, “the BBC is required to be impartial, and the Guardian is not.” So there you go.

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Bring On the Freedom Fries

Remember how it was SO CRAZY when the Venezuelan government recommended that the U.S. and Europe downgrade the FARC’s status from “terrorist” to “belligerent” just because they started freeing hostages last winter? And how that practically made Hugo Chavez a co-conspirator with KIDNAPPING and MURDER? That was so last January. Now it's April and a famous French captive is sick and the French government has a plan to free her which includes “French support when it takes over the presidency of the European Union in July as Paris will lobby for the rebel group to be removed from the EU list of terrorist organizations.”

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It Depends on What Your Definition of ‘Real’ Is

Quote for the Day:

"We're between the biggest producer of cocaine and the biggest consumer of cocaine, and we're the problem?"
-Nestor Reverol, president of Venezuela’s National Anti-Drug Office.

Hey good point! The Post ran a story today about Venezuela’s efforts to keep Colombia’s cocaine problem out of their country, basically a major increase in arrests, anti-drug infrastructure and massive seizures. The funny part was when the U.S. official attempted to explain why the way Colombia does it, which involves turning your government over to a foreign power and letting them kill your poor people with gunfire and napalm while seeing a net increase in cocaine production, is superior:

"If you want to see what makes a consequential difference, you look at what's been going on in Colombia -- real arrests, going after traffickers, infrastructure, really seizing."

Really seizing, see?

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BoRev Musicology: Luis Canaguá

The Doctor is in! Every fortnightmonth whenever or so, The University of Iowa's own ethno-musicologist T.M. "Tomás" Scruggs classes the up the joint with his exploration of the diverse sounds of Venezuela from just about every region, class, sect, ethnicity and political persuasion going. Check out our archive of previous songs, or click here to listen to Dr. Scruggs's one-hour audio-ethno-musical journey through the country.

This Week: Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be Venezuelan cowboys. Listen to Luis Canaguá. Liner notes and lyrics after the jump.

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April 8, 2008

Bush Will Personally Kill Colombian Labor Leaders if You Don’t Pass His Stupid Law

If we’ve learned anything about surviving the Bush era, it’s this: As the number of Administration and Washington Post staff reiterating a single message increases, the probability of it all being one big, fat lie approaches one.

Yesterday our dumb president went on the teevee to force the legislative branch into a vote on a trade deal with Colombia within 90 days. And while Congress will be allowed to read and discuss the bill, they will not be permitted to amend it in any way, because of the democracy.

This trade pact is all very crucial, says Bush, because the murder rate of Colombian trade unionists has gone down this year, and you wouldn’t want it to go back up now would you? Condi said basically the same thing in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, and of course the Post ran an editorial saying Obama must be crazy for “believing” the stories of violence at all, and on the right hand side of the same page George Will helpfully explains that last year “The murder rate of unionists was less than one-eighth the murder rate of Colombians generally.”

Clearly we are just one Colin Powell power point presentation away from a never-ending blood spattered Colombian trade quagmire.

UPDATES: You won’t know whether to laugh or cry over…today’s AP story on how “Uribe's administration has encouraged assassinations of trade unionists who cause problems for companies”…the NYT piece on the ridiculously extravagant multi-million dollar lobbying campaign the Colombian government is financing…the fact that Mark Penn never actually quit or got fired from the Clinton campaign over all this in the first place...this newly-released report on the human rights tragedy that is Colombia...Dan Kennedy's report on "the Clintons' longstanding tolerance of human-rights abuses in Colombia."

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April 9, 2008

Lamest. Dictatorship. Ever.

The Washington Post today runs this hilariously lame info graphic on Hugo Chavez’s families and possible links to nepotism! You see while some of the “clan” have parlayed their family name into quasi-influential political careers in one of Venezuela’s least significant states, the cute frowny one has become a “banker” and the one with the Travolta hairdo “has worked with programs run by Cuba.” Tremble before the Chavez brothers, people, for they have the power to refinance your mortgage. Click here to see it bigger.

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Cows Could Be Had, But Really Man, Don’t

Sweet Baby Jesus in a manger Venezuela has BANNED THE SIMPSONS to PROTECT KIDS then and REPLACED it with BAYWATCH!

I think we can safely report that Venezuela has finally beat out Japan as the country we like to laugh atwith no, at so much that editors no longer require fact checking when urban legends are brought to their desk. And this story going around today is going to be Venezuela’s Horney Salaryman Buys Dirty Schoolgirl Panties from Nagoya Vending Machine. Only of course that one was actually true. Wait, what? More after the jump.

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Meet The Chavez Siblings the Washington Post Didn’t Want You To See

Well, it looks like the Washington Post is only telling us half the story as usual! We’ve uncovered four more siblings of the Venezuelan president that didn’t make into today’s exposé-infographic thingy. Also, they make no mention of his four partially black children, because they are racist. What else could they be hiding?

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April 10, 2008

Great Moments in Fear

Since you people are constantly reading the Washington Times you’ve probably already heard how Evo Morales is forcing Bolivians to carry ID cards with the Star of David, just like they did in the Third Reich. Of course the “puzzling” part is that “the marked ID cards do not appear to target people who are Jewish or have Jewish ancestry” but still it’s a lot like what happened back in Holocaust times. Except that the controversy has been dismissed by the president of the Bolivian Jewish community “and Israel's honorary consul in Santa Cruz.” Anyway you should worry I guess, because of the Nazis.

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Piling On

Poor Mark Penn doesn’t have a single friend left in the universe. Even Venezuelan opposition bloggers are now blaming the sad sack Svengali for destroying their beautiful opposition movement with those phony exit polls their leaders paid him to fake in the first place. They set out to destroy democracy, but only destroyed themselves. Hey at least they’ve got someone to blame now, just like Hillary!

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Laptop Lulls English Language Press Into Deep Sleep

"There is no evidence linking Venezuela to terrorist groups, the head of the Organization of American States on Thursday told US lawmakers looking into last month's Colombia-Ecuador border crisis."

Hardy har. Connie Mack was so excited to hold his little Congressional subcommittee hearing on the FARC today that he forgot to interview his star witness before the media showed up, because he is a moron. So the guy overseeing the whole miracle laptop investigation just obliterated the entire U.S. strategy against Venezuela in front of the entire world. Awkward. Actually though it was only reported by AFP and in the Spanish language press so it technically doesn’t count.

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April 11, 2008

Happy Coup Day!

My how time flies. Anyway here's a copy of The Revolution Will Not be Televised, which depicts the events from April, 2002 when the Venezuelan TV stations kidnapped the president and installed some rich skeleton-person as Evil Lord of Destruction. If you're lucky enough to live in Caracas or New York, you may see some of his underworld goblins marching today to return darkness to the land, so watch out for snipers!

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April 13, 2008

Did you go to any of the "Worldwide Day of No" anti-Chavez marches this weekend? Was it tough getting around town with all the road closures? Did your local news carry wall-to-wall coverage of those cute little democracy huggers calling for another coup d’etat? No? Hmm. That’s maybe because, tragically, the “global convocation” rallied about “50 opposition sympathizers” in Caracas and, um, significantly fewer people in Bogotá, Mexico City and Miami, despite the awesome power of Facebook and some crappy video making software.

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Alvaro Uribe is Just a Misunderstood Sweetheart Who Happens To Enjoy Killing People Once In A While

Here’s some awesomeness: I just found out that the Miami Herald’s “ombudsman” is Edward Schumacher-Matos, a Colombian who is also the founding editor of the Spanish language version of the Wall Street Journal. You might think then that his critiques would read a little like some cranky old John Bircher evaluating Fox News and deciding they are way too nice to Nancy Pelosi, and you would be right. Only ha ha you’re not allowed to use the word “right” anymore.

Today he takes on the Miami Herald’s coverage of Colombia, and concludes that reporters are too hard on Alvaro Uribe, labeling him as “conservative” and his paramilitaries as “right wing” when in fact he is “center-left” and they are just criminals without political motivations and even mentioning any of these “labels” plays into Hugo Chavez’s hands so reporters should avoid such talk, pls.

Also, the Herald “relie[s] too much on union sources” when talking about union murders rather than reporting the official governments numbers which show far fewer politically motivated killings. And most human rights groups are leftists and reporters should be more “rigorous” lest they “mislead U.S. readers into making associations and drawing inferences, such as on human rights, that are correct.”

Ok actually he wrote the last word as “incorrect” but sometimes I have a little ombudsman in me too I guess.

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April 14, 2008

NYT: ‘Union Killings Peril Trade Pact With Colombia’

Sure it must be a huge bummer to have your family members killed off one by one for their political beliefs, but did you know that these murders also have implications on a bill currently before Congress? Can NYT headline writers make everything sound retarded? Anyway we’re just psyched that Simon Romero’s editors made him write something useful for a change, because dead Colombians are a “campaign issue.” Check it out:

>>> You know how allthoseeditorials said that trade union murders dropped so much recently? Well they’ve rebounded again hugely.

>>> Remember how thesefools said that it’s safer to be a Colombian unionist than to be a regular old Colombian? They deliberately ignore “geographic and socioeconomic factors” and the fact that “union officials continue to be specific targets.”

>>> In the rare cases where the government investigates union murders—like where one guy was tortured and stabbed in his home and his laptop and job-related memory sticks stolen—investigators won’t call it a political killing because it might have been a “crime of passion.”

>>> And naturally the perpetrators work for the government: “Mr. Uribe’s former intelligence chief, is under investigation for handing over lists to paramilitaries of union leaders and other left-wing figures who were singled out for assassination.”

Of course none of this would matter except that it’s 2008 and everybody on Hillary Clinton’s campaign is also on the Colombian payroll including her husband and she laughs like a crazed jackass whenever anyone asks her about it, which is what makes it relevant to you.

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April 15, 2008

Connie Mack is Like a Bully Only Less Threatening & More Orange

Just five short days ago the OAS Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza embarrassed short-fused Tang®-hued Florida Congressman Connie Mack in front of his entire subcommittee with the deflating observation that Venezuela doesn’t provide any funding to the FARC after all no matter how much you might wish they did. The moment was awkward and funny and Mack apparently stewed over it all weekend.

And yesterday afternoon Mack struck back by firing off this hilariously over-the-top letter to the Secretary General calling him, quote, “a puppet for the forces of tyranny,” and demanding that he recuse himself from any future laptop related investigations. He also said that Insulza claimed “repeatedly” that the FARC are not a terrorist organization to begin with, which sort of never happened, and now Mack says he “lacks confidence” in the organization as a whole. And then the OAS read it and had a good chuckle at the notion that anybody would care what this Connie Mack person thought about anything.

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Seriously Don't Fuck With Insulza

“On the day when millions of Americans are suffering by writing checks to the IRS, Congressman Connie Mack is suffering the added pain of the chicken pox. As a result, Congressman Mack will miss votes in the House of Representatives this week as well as any scheduled meetings and events. He is resting and looks forward to resuming his fight for lower taxes for the people of Southwest Florida very soon."

Ha ha.Developing...

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April 16, 2008

Sicko

A few weeks ago the Colombians announced that famous French FARC captive Ingrid Betancourt was suffering from hepatitis B and would probably die if she wasn't freed immediately. Since the Colombian government was never able to make that happen, it's been reassuring to learn that Betancourt was never particularly sick to begin with and the Colombians were just spreading stories to whip up anti-FARC sentiment. The crazy part is that they seem to have been feeding rumors to her long-suffering family members to keep the story in the media spotlight.

In early April her poor son was sent forward to tell the world that she needed to have a blood transfusion "in the coming hours," or she'd die. A few days later the apparent source of the information—former hostage Luis Eladio Perez—told reporters he'd never said that she was dying, but that she did seem sick. Then last week her husband told reporters that they weren't sure whether or not she'd ever had hepatitis in the first place. And now today her sister says that there is "no basis" to the hepatitis stories. But hey, Colombia was able to keep the story alive for multiple news cycles and all they had to do was make her distraught family think she was on the verge of death. Stay classy, guys!

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Stupid Venezuelans Don’t See How Poor and Oppressed they Are

See this impossible-to-read New York Times graph? It is the absolutely indisputable evidence that that money actually does buy happiness after all. Sorry hippies! As you would clearly see if you could read the damn thing, only people living in rich countries are happy. Except for Venezuelans, who are broke but happier than any other Latin Americans, most Europeans, and anybody in “The United States of America.” Don't they know any better? Click the image to see it big.

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Econ Cat Fight Enters Round IV, Ends

You may remember Francisco Rodriguez as the economist who has spent the better part of the last two years scientifically proving (with numbers!) that even though Venezuelans are spending more, eating more and generally happier today than even before, they are actually poor and miserable? His thesis is counterintuitive and counter-empirical and Foreign Affairs was thrilled to run his article last month without checking it too much, and of course it turned out to be riddled with so many methodological mistakes that the Center for Economic and Policy Research published it’s own paper pointing them all out. So then Rodriguez ratcheted up the (sexual?) tension by releasing his own-own “critique” of the CEPR paper that spent as much time attacking CEPR economist Mark Weisbrot personally as he did explaining his crappy methodology in the first place.

Anyway if econ cat fights are your bag you’ll be thrilled to learn that today CEPR responds. And it turns out Rodriguez’s rebuttal was as dumb as his original paper, filled with straw men, cherry picked data and, in some cases, all new numbers. And Weisbrot prefaces his paper with a fun little discussion of the political, media and academic context that the debate takes place in, including this:

The current debate is useful, although it would be better if Rodriguez actually cited my writing, rather than his own approximations to my writing. As will be seen below, these are not always accurate or even true.

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April 18, 2008

Our Short, Four Fingered, National Nightmare is Finally Over

Nine days, six hours and thirteen million lame, inaccurate stories later, a Venezuelan TV station is running The Simpson’s again—Hooray! You’ll remember that regulators originally asked Televen to move the show outside of morning-time children’s viewing hours, but instead the station dramatically pulled it from their lineup (for a week) and sent out a press release about how repressed they were. Now of course it’s back and running at 7 p.m. and all the stupid English language media outlets apologized for getting the story so wrong. Just kidding! Shit like this is running instead:

Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez has u-turned on his decision to ban The Simpsons from TV - allowing the popular U.S. cartoon to be shown at a later time.

Sigh. Chavez…always with the Chavez.

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April 20, 2008

Princess Lally’s Exclusive Uribe Interview!

It’s almost impossible to keep up with all the blood splattered corruption coming out of Colombia every day, but lord knows we try. In the last few days alone, we learned that just about every ministry in President Alvaro Uribe’s cabinet has been infiltrated by right-wing death squad leaders, that he only got re-elected by bribing Congressmen to amend the constitution, and that even the U.S. Congress is finally expressing outrage that his government is “indirectly encouraging attacks against labor leaders by allowing a presidential adviser to link the victims to leftist rebels.”

So what luck that in the middle of all these revelations, The Washington Post’s heiress/editor-princess Lally Weymouth was granted an exclusive interview with Uribe! What an opportunity to probe the depths of the depravity of Bush’s best BFF! What a chance to ask the tough questions! Or not:

Q. Haven't you stuck your neck out to be a good U.S. ally in the war on terrorism and the war on drugs?

Q. Try to explain to the American people how important the Free Trade Agreement is to your country -- what it means in terms of growth and how damaging it would be to you, who have been a strong U.S. ally, if the agreement is rejected.

Q. You put so much on the line for an ally, and Washington doesn't come through for you?

Now that’s journalism! Now in her defense, Lally is more of a celebrity interviewer rather than a news reporter, so maybe it’s just her shtick to conduct cloying puffy-puff interviews rather than trying to get a story. Of course, her interviews with other Latin American leaders have been a slightly tougher:

Last October, in a sit down with Ecuador’s Rafael Correa she questioned his economic plan, with probers like:

Q. Why wouldn't it be smarter to attract foreign capital instead of using up public savings?

Comes off sort of cocky doesn’t it? Did I mention that Correa is a Harvard trained* economist? And like the President of a country? Two years earlier, she really got down in the dirt with Hugo Chavez with lots of befuddled questions- without-a-question-mark:

Q: Experts in Washington claim you are encouraging radical groups throughout Latin America — that you're helping the FARC in Colombia, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, Shafik Handal and the FMLN in El Salvador, and Evo Morales and the MAS in Bolivia.

Yes, Lally. Elected Presidents Ortega and Morales are “radical groups.” Note to other “media families.” This kind of crap is what happens when you just give your kid a newspaper company.

* Update: Raf isn't Harvard educated. He got his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. Whatever. We mildly regret the error just like we mildly resent the FIVE THOUSAND READERS who have pointed this out.

April 21, 2008

Lugo. Lula. Lula. Lugo.

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Little Lally, Happy At Last

America’s beloved editor-princess Lally Weymouth is far too rich important to limit her musings to one major publication. Fortunately for America, her family doesn’t just own the Washington Post, they bought Newsweek, too! So now we get to watch her canoodle with President Death Squad all over again, only this time with her questions edited so she sounds more like a journalist and less like some dumb society dame: Compare/Contrast.

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Introducing the AP Style Guide To Latin America

Attention dummies! Do you find it hard keeping all those Mexican speaking countries straight? Is it hurting your career because you are a foreign correspondent who has to write semi-plausible stories about Latin America for a living? Well you’re in luck because finally, inexplicably, the Associated Press has published a handy cheat sheet for retards like you! For instance:
> Peru is: center-right, sometimes feuds with Chavez
> Nicaragua is: leftist, often denounces U.S. influence, but welcomes U.S. aid.
> Guatemala: center-left, close historic ties with U.S. since we killed off all their poor people and political dissidents.

(Emphasis added). Like the BoRev operative who found this said, “I think i will laminate this and keep it in my wallet,” and so should you!

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April 22, 2008

Keeping Up With Hunky McHotsalot

Happy Earth Day everybody! Can you name the country that manages to pack Pacific coastline, the Andes, the Amazon and “the Galapagos” into just over 100,000 square miles, and whose president happens to have two perfect Earth-like globes that come together to form his ass? Of course we are talking about Ecuador, and while we could talk about Rafael Correa any day of the year, we will especially talk about him on Earth Day for some reason! He’s been busy:

First! Correa has been promising since his campaign to boot the Americans from Ecuador when Manta airbase lease expires next year. Manta was the last U.S. base in South America (excluding “the nation of Colombia” of course) and U.S. Southern Command is cutely pretending to “respect Ecuador's decision” until his plane goes down mysteriously over Panama or something.

Next! Raf fires his Defense Minister when it turns out that his own intelligence services have been spying on the Ecuadorian Congress—perhaps at the behest of the C.I.A.?. The replacement is, awesomely, “a journalist and poet” tasked with “mak[ing]the relationship between the military and civil society more transparent.” Sounds great!

Then! The New York Times exposes the extent of the infiltration of Ecuadorian intelligence agencies, who had been engaging in domestic spying and reporting their findings, not to their own chain of command, but to “Colombian forces and their American military advisers.”

And Finally! Rafael gives the awesome-ist interview of his career to the Spanish newspaper Publico. The gloves are now, officially, finally, forever, off. He calls Uribe a liar, the head of a “completely discredited” government, “the little emperor who follows his boss’s dictates,” and “terribly psychotic,” and then he really lays into him. Seriously, don’t miss it. Spanish speakers can watch the video. For the rest of you, Machetera’s got the full English language transcript.

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Just Another Day in Paradise

So Alvaro Uribe’s cousin just got arrested “for his suspected ties to paramilitary squads.” He is, of course “one of President Alvaro Uribe's most intimate allies,” since the two co-founded their stupid political party together 20 years ago. "Mario" Uribe now joins the more than 30 other intimate allies of the America’s favorite democrat currently rotting away in jail for their own ties to terrorism. And lest we forget: “Among those jailed in the scandal are Uribe's former chief of domestic intelligence, Jorge Noguera, who has been accused of giving the paramilitaries a "hit list" of labor and opposition leaders,” which is why we must give these assholes a trade deal today.

Update 9:15 p.m.: Mario sought asylum at the Costa Rican embassy in Bogotá tonight and was promptly rejected. San Jose "said police would force him to leave the embassy building if he refused to go."

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Latin America: Hot, Not, or Indio?

In case your wallet is not already overstuffed with trite, laminated ways to tell one sector of our backyard apart from the other, today the Los Angeles Times publishes its own stupid people’s guide to America’s Latin Quarter.
Highlights: Macho President Michelle Bachelet makes Chile a “firm U.S. friend.”
Lowlights: Pussy Bolindian Evo Morales is always whining because “the U.S. plots to remove him from office.”

Dumb-lights: The Times lists Rafael Correa as “Harvard-trained” because we did the other day by mistake, only we corrected it.
Ha-ha-lights: We’re now at 9 leftist countries versus, like, Machu Picchu and Bomb-bombzaland.
Haw-haw-haw-lights: Colombia is called “center-right.”

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April 24, 2008

Those oddball free marketeers from the Cato Institute just made a funny mistake and offered offered a “freedom” prize to a 23-year-old Serbian-trained Marigold Revolutionary Venezuelan adolescent, simultaneously violating their own non-interventionist policies, undermining a proud six-year tradition of rewarding geriatric economist types, and hilariously shoving a libertarian-style invisible hand up the poop-chute of democracy!

Wait, back up. Meet Yon Goicoechea! The adorably pudgy leader of Venezuela’s opposition student movements is now five hundred thousand dollars richer, thanks to a Cato-sponsored award named after well-known freedom lover “Milton Friedman” (not the New York Times shitbag but the Nixon/Pinochet advisor—ed.). After receiving full-scholarship training in the finer arts of Color Revolutionizing in Belgrade courtesy of U.S. taxpayers and ultra-right-wing European political parties, Mr.Goicoechea returned to his native Venezuela where he made speeches, posed for Playboy, and printed up printed up thousands of “Fraud!” t-shirts to prove to the world that Venezuelan elections were rigged only then his side won and so they weren’t.

Goicoechea “plans to use the prize money to support Venezuela's student parliament, donate to his university and former school, and support a foundation he is helping to set up that will offer training to young leaders who want to play a role in politics.”

PS: Don’t miss Cato’s online shrine to Yon, including a “famous quotes” page where he shares his youthful wisdom in soundbyte form, including, (my favorite) “We are not trying to destabilize the country.” Moving words, Yon! Maybe you can take the cash and like not destabilize Curacao for a while.

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April 25, 2008

Can We Be Friends?

Dear dumb Latins. We Americans are super sorry about all the misunderstandings we’ve had throughout the years, particularly all those time where you have misinterpreted our good intentions and thought we might have had a hand in some of those unfortunate armed conflicts in Honduras or Panama or Ecuador or Cuba or Nicaragua or Grenada or the Dominican Republic or Chile or El Salvador or Uruguay or Guatemala or wherever. How stupid of you, right? But hey we’re willing to let bygones be bygones.

Anyhoo as part of our ongoing efforts to “build confidence and trust among nations through collective maritime security efforts that focus on common threats and mutual interests,” we intend to station an entire Naval fleet off the coast of Venezuela, headed up by a nuclear aircraft carrier, forever! Doesn’t that sound collective and confidence building? The whole thing is meant to “send a message to the entire region, not just Venezuela,” so don’t worry. We’re still figuring out the “focus,” of the "mission." but it “will probably be on security.”

This was your heads up so you don’t do anything stupid like invade our mobile sovereign coastal boundaries or kablooey, k?

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Professors School Reporters on Crappy Magic Laptop Coverage

It was bound to happen: twenty-one of academia’s leading minds got around to reading those magic laptop documents that totally prove the link between the FARC and Venezuela and realized that oops actually they don’t. Now they’ve written an open letter to the media begging reporters to “exercise a more critical eye in its reporting than has been demonstrated to date” before they get us into another stupid war.

It’s a nice initiative, but longtime readers might spot the fatal flaw in the professors’ strategy. That’s right, the journalists who cover Venezuela are lazy illiterates busy professionals, so good luck getting them to read your three-page footnoted letter, brainiacs! In the spirit of being helpful, I’ve created a diagram that might meet the Lilliputian attention spans rigorous schedules of our intended audience. That would be the magic laptop there at the intersection, any questions?

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April 28, 2008

IMFucked: Snickering at the Impending Demise of the Ultimate Predatory Lender

Hey remember the International Monetary Fund? The evil economic overlords who are the world’s leading experts in bringing countries out of poverty only they’ve never managed to do it once, leading some analysts and thousands of grungy protesters to wonder if they were maybe doing it on purpose because nobody’s that incompetent? The institution that has been humorously flailing ever since every Latin American country decided to refinance their debt with Venezuela, willing to pay double the going interest rate in order to keep what was left of their economies out of the hands of those jerkoffs?

Well they are officially broke. And by “broke” I mean, “running a whopping small-country-size $400-million annual deficit of its own and…being forced into some of the same kinds of ‘structural adjustments’ it used to impose on indebted Third World nations.” And if you found that sentence ridiculously satisfying to read, here’s the link to Mark Weisbrot’s column on the whole epic tragicomedy from Sunday’s LA Times. All of which might explain why IMF officials have been acting strangely… human lately.

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April 29, 2008

Signs of the Apocalypse

It turns out that the sole cautionary, cassandric voice of journalistic reason in the entire magic laptop discussion is now, officially and forever, inexplicably, The Washington Times. With today’s 900-word treatise on the Colombian government’s distortions of their contents, the wrongest of rightwing rags emerged as a modest and sensible alternative to the lunacy mainstream press coverage of Latin American politics. And then the earth’s magnetic field destabilized and the poles reversed and everyone froze to death and then their bodies caught on fire and then they drowned the end.

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Karma Roundup

>>> As if public humiliation, chickenpocks and an unattractive orangey sheen weren’t enough of a burden, Florida himbo Connie Mack suffered another blow when “ranking Republican” Dick Lugar explained that declaring Venezuela a state sponsor of terror would be a truly stupid idea.

>>> “When Tom Donohue, President and CEO of the US Chamber of Commerce, said this morning that "Nancy Pelosi is an agent for Chávez", he actually got booed.“

>>> U.S. “Czar on Drugs” John Walters likes to tell reporters that Venezuela’s role in the drug trade is gaining on Colombia’s, but ha ha his own power point tells a different story.

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April 30, 2008

So Much for 'Ethanol Diplomacy'

Feel that rumbling in your tummy? That’s because the world is OUT OF FOOD. Thanks to greedy Iowa farmers and some deal between Bush and Brazil, Americans have been putting the last of Earth’s ingestible resources into our gas tanks instead of our mouths and yet we’ve all still managed to invade Iraq for oil and become morbidly obese. Anyway now we’re out of corn and everyone is dying and it’s allthepresscan talkabout.

Obviously experts had seen this global food crisis coming for years now, so we’d been warned, right? Here’s what “Perfect Latin American Idiot” Alvaro Vargas Llosa wrote in the Washington Post last spring:

“Incidentally, ethanol is making Chavez and Castro nervous. One proof is the hysterical article Castro wrote for Granma, Cuba's official newspaper, lashing at those who want ‘to convert food into combustibles’ and accusing them of wanting to condemn to ‘premature death and thirst more than 3 billion people of the world.’”